Stock markets play a key role in corporate financing in Asia. However, despite their increasing importance in terms of size and cross-border investment activity, the region's markets are reputed to be more “idiosyncratic” and less reliant on economic and corporate fundamentals in their...

In distilling a vast literature spanning the rational — irrational divide, this paper offers reflections on why asset bubbles continue to threaten economic stability despite financial markets becoming more informationally-efficient, more complete, and more heavily influenced by sophisticated...

This paper examines the sizable role of rehypothecation in the shadow banking system. Rehypothecation is the practice that allows collateral posted by, say, a hedge fund to its prime broker to be used again as collateral by that prime broker for its own funding. In the United Kingdom, such use...

This paper explores the concept of global liquidity, its measurement and macro-financial importance. We construct two sets of indicators for global liquidity: a quantity series distinguishing between core and noncore liabilities of financial intermediatires and a corresponding price series....

Country practices towards managing financial risks on a sovereign balance sheet continue to evolve. Each crisis period, and its legacy on sovereign balance sheets, reaffirms the need for strengthening financial risk management. This paper discusses some salient features embedded in in the...

Deleveraging has two components -- shrinking of balance sheets due to increased haircuts/shedding of assets, and the reduction in the interconnectedness of the financial system. We focus on the second aspect and show that post-Lehman there has been a significant decline in the interconnectedness...

The recent crises highlighted the role of cross-border banking linkages. This paper proposes two new measures for better capturing creditor banking systems' foreign credit exposures and borrower countries' reliance on foreign bank credit, by combining BIS data with bank-level data. The results...

In the wake of the recent global crisis the international community is giving an increased focus on stability of the financial system, so-called financial stability analysis. With the increasing need for data sets to undertake this analysis, the question naturally arises as to what types of data...

This paper highlights the changing collateral landscape and how it may shape the global demand/supply for collateral. We first identify the key collateral pools (relative to the "old" collateral space) and associated collateral velocities. Post-Lehman and continuing into the European crisis,...

Financial lubrication in markets is indifferent to margin posting via money or collateral; the relative price(s) of money and collateral matter. Some central banks are now a major player in the collateral markets. Analogous to a coiled spring, the larger the quantitative easing(QE) efforts, the...